InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ
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Scaling Scrum Without the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team. The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate. Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.
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Interview: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future
In this interview, InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu, interviewed Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.
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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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SEI publishes report integrating CMMI and Agile
Last week was hot in international scenario on software development. The SEI (Software Engineering Institute) recently published a report entitled " CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!", which addresses the integration between the ideas and practices of the CMMI with the ideas and practices of Agile as something possible in software development projects.
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Infrastructure Made Easy for Agile Software Teams
Getting the right infrastructure set up is instrumental for the success of Agile software teams. Teams now have the option of deploying a fresh infrastructure using Buildix or using an online workspace provided by Assembla to kick start their project in no time.
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Performance Reviews Banished
In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Culbert argues that annual performance and pay reviews are at best dysfunctional. He sees their primary purpose as "intimidation aimed at preserving the boss's authority and power advantage". Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck, ... offer alterantives
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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Presentation: Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Michael Mah analyzes the development process in 5 companies: 2 Agile (one of them BMC) and 3 classic. He measures the development progress and effectiveness and compares the results with industry averages. He also presents the factors which contributed to the success of BMC's Agile adoption.
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Agility Means Truthfulness
Talk about agile can often tend toward the tangible things that people do day-to-day, toward the "process of agile", but true agility is really less about process and more about principle. Travis Birch presents his perspective about some of these more intangible aspects of agile, namely "truthfulness".
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Agile and Offshore: Asking for Trouble?
Kevin Coleman told his story working with an offshore team that claimed to be 'Agile' and the woes and worries that came with that experience in last month's issue of the Agile Journal. Several readers validated his experience with their own. In practice, can Agile methods be used successfully with offshore teams given today's business reality?
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Venture Capital Group Acknowledges Overtime Detrimental to Scrum
Sustainable pace is known to help teams with improved velocity. Jeff Sutherland and Clinton Keith quote studies to prove that it works. However, there is an underlying word of caution which suggests that teams should take their sprint goals seriously and a couple of crunch sprints might not hurt after all.
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Is a "Sprint" Detrimental to an Agile Transition?
Joe Kreb's says that the term "sprint" in Scrum is detrimental to successful Agile transitions. "On the one side, a sprint may convey the wrong message in an organization among executives and the team alike. It requires, however, little explanation because everyone knows a sprint is short. It could simply mean, we are "fast", but it could also mean "over-time" or "aggressive schedules". "
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Presentation: Future Directions for Agile
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Anderson talks about the history of Agile, the current status of it and his vision for the future. The role of Agile does not stand in just having a practice, but in finding ways to implement the principles contained by the Agile Manifesto.
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Managing Risk with Scrum
Risk management deals with reducing the probability and impact of adverse events on a project. Members of the Agile community discuss whether explicit risk management is required or it is addressed implicitly as a part of Scrum.
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Use Cases or User Stories?
User stories are better than use cases - right? Not necessarily. It depends on whom you ask. There are definite benefits to user stories as they encourage conversation and discourage the "throw over the wall" mentality of more heavy-weight requirements documents. But do they have drawbacks?